Re: OAuth2 support in git?

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Jun 14, 2018, 21:01 UTC
Message-ID: <20180614210132.GA12460@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <003c01d40420$bd522990$37f67cb0$@nexbridge.com>

On Thu, Jun 14, 2018 at 04:46:10PM -0400, Randall S. Becker wrote:

Show 15 quoted lines

> > I suspect (2) would fit in with the existing code better, as the special case
> > would mostly be limited to the manner in which we feed the credential to
> > curl. And you could probably just set a config option for "this url's auth will
> > be oauth2", and use the existing mechanisms for providing the password.
> > 
> > We'd maybe also want to allow credential helpers to say "by the way, this
> > password should be treated as a bearer token", for cases where you might
> > sometimes use oauth2 and sometimes a real password.
> 
> Be aware that there are 4 (ish) flavours of OAuth2 the last time I
> checked. It is important to know which one (or all) to implement. The
> embedded form is probably the easiest to comprehend - and the least
> implemented from my research. More common OAuth2 instances use a
> third-man website to hold session keys and authorization. That may be
> problematic for a whole bunch of us who do not play in that world.

I think Git's usage would be limited to "how do I present this token for my requests". I don't think we'd ever recognize an oauth redirect and try to fulfill it ourselves. We'd rely on getting a 401 and punting all those bits to a credential helper to do the heavy lifting.

I say that not knowing much about oauth2, of course, so maybe there would be complications with that approach (I do know there are multiple ways you can present a token, but we'd support whichever ones people are interested in enough to show up and provide a patch for).

-Peff